The New Year

THE OLDER YOU GET the shorter your horizon when it comes to the future. When you are halfway through your sixth decade, and on the cusp of a new year, you hesitate when thinking about the future; you no longer take the future for granted as you once did in your youth. Time then was plentiful and you could plan ahead with every expectation of seeing completion.  When you are old, you have to use great care about the future; you must never tempt fate by planning an outing even several months into the future.

                

                I know 65 is not considered old today; but even in the past it marked the entry point into retirement; a period of slowing down; a period when activity is restricted by your age from all sorts of youthful activities. For some and many more in the future, humans can be expected to live another 35 years. But I have health problems and I am therefore highly sceptical of becoming an eighty-year-old let alone marking up a century. I do however have the septuagenarian's outlook on the future, which is a realistic accommodation with the future; this is why I look to the New Year more in hope than expectation that I will survive until the next New Year.

                

                  In any case, the future for the elderly, especially those who no longer have a spouse or relatives prepared to put the effort into keeping them solvent, is pretty grim. I would no longer wish to receive a telegram from the by then King Charles or William than I would welcome being kept alive by artificial means when I could no longer lead an independent life, free from the clutches of what is called a retirement home where group activity is encouraged and the elderly are in the control of well-meaning and compassionate people, but are nevertheless reliant on others; and the frailer they become as the years pass the more they show the symptoms of the childhood from which they sprang, and there follows from this, in their final months, being fed by hand; being taken to the toilet; having incontinent nappies changed for them – surely death is not so bad that we cling to this indignity.

THE NEW YEAR is now upon us and the young, as they should, look toward a prosperous and happy future. They know that they will see another and another, and yet many another New Year, and, as they should, think in terms of progress; of advancement in whatever field they work, whether in the solid grounding in any skill they have been apprenticed to, or any academic discipline they have been fortunate enough in studying for.

                

                The productive life has always been for youth. Ambition and drive, followed by a comfortable living, is the ambition of ambitious youth. They can treat, for at least 40 years, the future as being taken for granted in terms of them being alive to realise their ambitions. Many will not make that transition to some kind of happiness. Diseases affect the young as well as the old; many a military career has been stopped in its track by a bullet, or piece of shrapnel. But on the whole, the horizon for the young is vast in terms of life expectancy.

               

                So now I start my 66^th year on this earth. It is a time when I have always, ever since childhood, seen Easter as my next horizon. I have always loved the spring, and in my later years preferred Easter to Christmas, as the overture to spring. Christmas is for childhood, and Easter is for warmer temperatures that every retiree seeks.

IN MY YOUTH I had a newspaper round; it was the best job I ever had. The newsagent I worked for was local, and the business he worked for had a local monopoly on the distribution of newspapers. Some of my customers each year ordered something called Old Moore's Almanac; a predictive booklet that told its readers of its prophecies for the following year.

               

                I now, in deference if not reverence to Old Moore, seek to lay claim to his powers temporarily, and predict the political events that after New Years' Eve will come to pass over the coming twelve months. Of course, guesswork is not an exact science - or even a science. But there is sufficient trails laid by the events in 2015, to allow for a creative speculation on our nation's immediate future.

               

                This coming year will continue the process of European decline, accelerated by a 'remain' victory in the up and coming EU referendum; however meagre Cameron's negotiating demands; however contemptible the EU's lack of any kind of meaningful response. The EU knows that Cameron would vote for our membership of the EU, even if it demands from the prime minister, Herod- like, he should kill all of the first-born of all Eurosceptics.

               

                 In 2016, migration will remain the number one issue for the indigenous people of the UK. Last summer's great influx from Syria, Iraq, and even Pakistan, has been tempered by the winter. Come the spring and summer the tempo will once more pick up. Coupled with the continents open borders policy; the UK's welfare system, housing, education; and most important of all, the NHS will be undermined by the sheer weight of numbers seeking entry to the UK.

                

                 Islamism will continue to prosper, not necessarily from military victories, but from the 15 million Muslims resident in Europe – 2.5 million of who live in the UK. These vast numbers represent a forest within Europe which Islamism can hide and strike at the kafir at every opportunity.

2016 WILL BE a year dictated by foreign rather than domestic concerns. This does not mean that domestic economics and politics will not be important, especially in Europe, and particularly in the UK with the possibility of a Corbyn premiership fuelled by government failure on all economic and political fronts. While a referendum victory insufficiently won, in terms of the weight of numbers, only keeps the Eurosceptic cause alive.

                

                Corbyn will not win in 2020, and there is nothing that can happen in 2016 to change the public's mind about him. If the Labour Party had a more agreeable leader (agreeable to the public that is) then the Labour Party would be the favourite to win in 2020.

                

                There will be instability within both the main parties in 2016. Whatever the outcome of the EU referendum, the problem of Europe will not go away for the Cameron Tories; if they win the referendum, then there will follow more desertions to Ukip from Tory MPs many among whom have the full loyalty of their constituents – so politically and economically we will be living in an interesting time in 2016.

                

                So this is my ' Old Moore's Almanac' for the coming year. I am indeed old and getting older; time is not on my side, and I do not want to witness the terminal decline, made so by our politicians, of Western civilisation. Liberals may think it the ravings of a reactionary who despises modernism in all its cultural forms. Well they would be right, but for the wrong reason.